Construction Lifter
"Construction in progress, do not disturb." :- Sign at a Sprawl construction site Rome was not built in a day, or so the saying goes. Similarly, the Sprawls of the Mediterranean Syndicate did not spring up overnight. Before a Sprawl can become a Sprawl, infrastructure must be built. Housing to hold workers, company headquarters, roads, plumbing, power lines, and of course, the cabling that is vital for Syndicate communications. While for the most part, Sprawls used cheap labour to accomplish all this, a certain Carla Pietri thought the Syndicate could do better. And so, Pietri put the top engineers of her company, Pietri Industries, to work on the problem of coming up with a machine that would be able to supplant cheap labour in construction work and allow Pietri to dominate the Sprawl construction industry. To this end, the engineers worked over a plethora of blueprints, schematics, and designs. Lacking the SPAM module technology of the Allies (a secret so guarded that even the Japanese failed to acquire it) or the nanotechnology of the Japanese, the engineers had to make do with what they had. The new construction vehicle would likely have to be a vehicle of conventional design, not unlike the International Inc Construction Dozer, a vehicle which, to the Syndicate's chagrin, was dominating the civilian construction market. To that end, the engineers sought to make a vehicle that was more cost effective that the Construction Dozer. Unfortunately, their attempts failed, as they found that they could not best the simple yet effective Construction Dozer. How to best it in simplicity? The engineers found a way, eventually coming to the answer; Efficient specialization. Instead of making one, expensive, unspecified vehicle that could do a multitude of tasks but was not particularly effective at one, why not make multiple specialized vehicles, which would be far better than the unspecialized vehicle at its specified task. It would be cost efficient and cheaper, since it would only need to be good at that one task, allowing for cost savings during assembly, since unnecessary parts could be eliminated. A few minor revisions to the designs were made, before the engineers submitted them to Pietri. Pietri was impressed, and quickly approved the designs for the SCV series Mobile Construction and Lifting Units, or Construction Lifters for short (SCV standing for Specialised Construction Vehicle.) Soon Pietri Industries was churning out these vehicles in the hundreds, and it wasn't too long before International Inc's stranglehold over the industry was broken. The Construction Lifter was able to get a decent share of the market, though it was far from the monopoly Pietri had hoped for. Man contractors still preferred to stick to cheap labour. The Construction Lifter was most successful when it came to projects situated in more developed countries, such as the Neo-Tokyo Construction Project (before it was destroyed by Yuriko Omega, at least), used Construction Lifters almost exclusively - mainly because the Japanese populace would never have consented to work at what they would have considered slave wages and would not have tolerated the importation of cheap foreign labour either. However, the biggest users of the Construction Lifters came not to be any civilian contractor, but rather Legion Security. It was necessary for the mercenary corp to be able to quickly establish forward outposts and bases, a task for which they could not rely on cheap physical labour for. They were simply too unreliable - too likely to run away at the first crack of a bullet, and not always available in any case. Legion Security wanted the Construction Lifter. After a couple of signatures, Pietri Industries had a massively lucrative contract - and Legion Security had the rapid outpost deployment capability it wanted.